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Comment I was protesting in the USA with Occupy last fall (Score 1) 583

We got lots of evidence (more than enough to show probable cause) showing Obama gave orders to large groups within Federal Government in Homeland Security and FBI to lead local/state police on the ground in sweeping out all the Occupy groups in late night raids when nobody would be watching on TV.

It was highly illegal for Obama to give orders to Federal Government personnel to lead local police against those protesters. It's was made legal later after Obama had gone after Occupy protesters.

Comment Whistleblowers protected by Federal Law (Score 2) 860

"The disclosure by a person, usually an employee in a government agency or private enterprise, to the public or to those in authority, of mismanagement, corruption, illegality, or some other wrongdoing.

Since the 1960s, the public value of whistle-blowing has been increasingly recognized. For example, federal and state statutes and regulations have been enacted to protect whistleblowers from various forms of retaliation. Even without a statute, numerous decisions encourage and protect whistleblowing on grounds of public policy. In addition, the federal False Claims Act (31 U.S.C.A. 3729) will reward a whistleblower who brings a lawsuit against a company that makes a false claim or commits Fraud against the government.

Persons who act as whistleblowers are often the subject of retaliation by their employers. Typically the employer will discharge the whistleblower, who is often an at-will employee. An at-will employee is a person without a specific term of employment. The employee may quit at any time and the employer has the right to fire the employee without having to cite a reason. However, courts and legislatures have created exceptions for whistleblowers who are at-will employees.

Whistleblowing statutes protect from discharge or discrimination an employee who has initiated an investigation of an employer's activities or who has otherwise cooperated with a regulatory agency in carrying out an inquiry or the enforcement of regulations. Federal whistle-blower legislation includes a statute protecting all government employees, 5 U.S.C.A. 2302(b)(8), 2302(b)(9). In the federal civil service, the government is prohibited from taking, or threatening to take, any personnel action against an employee because the employee disclosed information that he or she reasonably believed showed a violation of law, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public safety or health. In order to prevail on a claim, a federal employee must show that a protected disclosure was made, that the accused official knew of the disclosure, that retaliation resulted, and that there was a genuine connection between the retaliation and the employee's action.

Many states have enacted whistleblower statutes, but these statutes vary widely in coverage. Some statutes apply only to public employees, some apply to both public and private employees, and others apply to public employees and employees of public contractors...."

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Whistleblowing

Comment Ubuntu Unity worst phone/tablet OS alpha test ever (Score -1, Flamebait) 121

Mark Shuttleworth wanted to develop tablet & phone OS with touch. He didn't have any way to get that built and tested, though. Shuttleworth just lied and said he wanted his "desktop of the future" to have huge buttons on it. Sure he did.

I can't believe so many people defended Unity as a desktop OS. Can't believe so many suckers bought it.

Comment Wrong. "Truth About Aaron Swartz "crime"" (Score 5, Informative) 382

"-Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser.
-Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.
-The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.
-I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.

http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/

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